In his paper Karen Momdzhyan defends the approach according to which the character of social and human sciences is about nomothetic. The author connects the need for nomothetic procedures with the existence of objective, necessary and universally recurring relations of social life, which turn it into a law_governed process in spite of the existence of free human will. He builds his argument on the scheme of the nomothetic cognition vs. the ideographic cognition. The nomothetic cognition searches for what is most general and common behind various events whereas the ideographic cognition concentrates on the analysis of what is particular. He argues against the postmodernist attempts to introduce only ideographic research paradigm into cultural and human studies.

Keywords:

social theory, nomothetic method, free will, values, social dynamics, regularities of social development.